trail wrote:
shoff14 wrote:
My thoughts after the quoting process that this goes both ways. Contractors are too lazy to quote detail because 90% of the people they are quoting don't understand the detail or don't care. When a contractor meets someone that is into the detail, this is likely the person they don't want to have to deal with because they will catch a problem that 99% of people won't catch. Giving a crappy quote likely won't land them the job that they don't want in the first place.
Next year the wife and I are most likely going to start looking at a kitchen reno + flooring for the main floor. FML when I need to go through that process.
Yeah, that makes sense. The contractor I ended up going with provided a good medium level of detail. For example, he broke out the costs of permitting the unit. Which is significant - around $1000 - and he walked me through everything involved including meeting a city inspector at the house, etc. It seems it's in a contractor's best interest to break things like that out because otherwise a customer doesn't know what's involved in permitting and just adding $1000 to the total looks no different than just jacking up the price.
Mostly I appreciated that he went through the entire estimate with me over about an hour, while he was making it, asking questions each step of the way, down to specific model #'s of each piece of equipment. Rather than all the others who just sent them to me after the fact and assumed I had no interest in picking specific components.
I guess it's two approaches to business:
1) Get as many estimates done as quickly as possible. With the theory that putting extra time into estimates just doesn't pay off in margin or "conversion rate."
2) Go all-in with each estimate. Take a big loss of 3-4 hours of labor on unconverted estimates, but pay off in higher conversion rate/margin (and possibly long-term reputation).
2) certainly works better on me.
I agree with trail. Deal is, to me, it comes off as being a hack and dishonest. Frankly. The poster above saying a detail oriented customer will catch things making it not worth doing the work for them? That's just sleazy.
I notice folks might get a better deal with a jack leg outfit that has zero breakout and a lower quote up front, but then the back end comes with the problems making that up front deal sour. Be it ballooning scope to makeup for that bad quote, or shoddy work.
We almost always go with the more professional outfit that gives an acceptably detailed quote (not superfluous but not just a scribble on a napkin).
One thing that makes no sense to me also is places sending out gophers to quote shit they know nothing about. We had a tree go through the roof years ago and one guy showed up to quote the work. Wife called me at work to ask me about some of the damage, as the guy couldn't find it in the attic.
Not knowing the guy was on speaker on the phone I said "the idiot can't see the 2' x 3' hole and the three in a row cracked trusses?". Yeah, they didn't get that work.
There's very practical reasons for basic quote detail. It shows the contractor agrees with the customer on the scope of work. Work doesn't have scope if it isn't stated. If a contractor doesn't list a $1000 inspection then that might not be in scope then suddenly "sorry, that'll be $1000 or you need to arrange that yourself" kind of junk.
One to watch for with hvac groups hiding things under a bulk price is the skyrocket cost of legacy refrigerants. You get a new system replacing old and your old system was basically full of "gold" worth way more than the time labor to extract it. Not sure how that goes state by state as some it's a loss as they can't reuse it anywhere at all, but pretty sure they can recover/reuse it to top up existing systems not being replaced.